The fifth of in my series of SEO Report Cards for Practical eCommerce magazine led to the “deconstruction” of AirTroductions.com, which is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 17,000 registered).
I found it to be a solid website, which, with some tuning, would make for a better ride in the search engines. And with fewer than 30 pages in Google, there was indeed room for improvement.
I’ve highlighted a few of my findings from this SEO mini-audit:
Opportunities abound to get many more pages indexed. For example, every airport code search result (like this one) should be indexed, but currently the only way to these pages is through a web form. Remember, spiders can’t fill out forms.
Every page indexed has the same title tag. This makes it significantly harder for the site to effectively target a range of keywords. That’s because each page has its own “song” based on the page’s keyword focus, and crafting a unique title tag for that page based on its keyword focus is essential to really make the page “sing” well to the search engines.
The home page (http://www.airtroductions.com/) is a 302 (temporary-style) redirect to http://www.airtroductions.com/Anonymous/Login.aspx, which may be causing some loss of link gain. A 301 (permanent) redirect would be better here than a 302. But a “rewrite” would be best of all, since in that case the URL wouldn’t appear to change at all upon loading the home page.
Pages at airtroductions.com (without www.) are appearing in the search indices in addition to www.airtroductions.com pages, leading to a dilution of link gain and indexation of duplicate pages. Permanent (301) redirects from airtroductions.com URLs to corresponding www.airtroductions.com URLs would be just the thing here.
Get the rest of my findings in the full article here.
Getting the balance right between SEO and usability
Friday, 10 November 2006
Finding the right balance between SEO and a usability can sometimes be a challenge. The two strategies can conflict and companies may mistakenly favor one over the other. For example, one company may choose to stuff the same keywords into every alt tag in their navigation graphics. That, of course, detracts from the user experience, making the page slower to load and making the page difficult to interpret for the visually impaired who rely on screen readers to read web pages to them.
Then there are others who try to maximize usability without any concern for SEO. They choose to “Googleize” their home page, stripping all non-essential elements out of the page and making it as simple and streamlined as Google’s home page. That, unfortunately, offers very little for the search engines to “sink their teeth into,” and consequently insufficient clues for the search engine to identify appropriate keyword themes for your page.
Here’s another way to think of it: search engine spiders are another type of “disabled” visitor — one that can’t read what’s inside your images, fill out your web forms, or interact with the Flash, Java, JavaScript, AJAX etc. on your pages. Therefore, usability and accessibility of your content to spiders is a requirement if you want good search engine rankings. You kill two birds with one stone by optimizing your site’s usability.
In my estimation, usability should come first. An unusable website won’t generate an adequate ROI, even if it ranks well in the engines.
Then there are the sites that miss the mark on both counts — usability and SEO. Consider Nike.com, which just got picked apart for its SEO mistakes in an article on MarketingProfs this week. (I just blogged a quick summary of the article here.) I agree that Nike.com misses the mark in regards to search, and I also find the site severely lacking when it comes to usability and accessibility, IMHO.
I have an article called “Usability and Findability — Getting the Synergy Right” in this month’s issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. If you’re a STC member, you should check it out.
A while back I did an information-packed 90-minute webinar for Marketing Profs called “Google in the Real World: How Links Boost Your Ranking”. I obtained permission from MarketingProfs to post an archived version of all the webinars I did for them on my site. I just created a screencast of this webinar on link building and uploaded it. Check it out…
If you’re burned out from business travel but still want to partake in conferences / trade shows on ecommerce and online marketing, then a virtual trade show like eComXpo might be just the thing for you. eComXpo opens today and will go on for three days (Oct 24-26).
With such intellectual powerhouses as Chris Anderson and John Battelle keynoting, I’m sure the show will be a hit.
I’m speaking as part of their “eComXpo University,” their on-demand portion of the show that covers various aspects of Affiliate, Search and Interactive Marketing. My session, “Link Building Your Way to the Top of the Rankings” is a joint presentation with link building guru Eric Ward. Many of the University presentations (including my own) will be available free of charge to attendees (registration to attend the virtual trade show is free, btw) during the 3 day event. Check out Eric’s and my session if you get a chance. The University sessions will continue to be available to University Subscribers for up to 6 months following the close of eComXpo.
I’ve got 5 four-month Univerity subscriptions to give away to my loyal readers. That’s a $100 value. Email me at if you want one, but BE QUICK!
A compelling link request that I as a blogger want to act on is as rare as hen’s teeth. Nearly all the ones I get are complete garbage, like this one. When making a link request, these are the sorts of statements to avoid, as they will doom your request to the recipients Trash folder. I’ve included with each statement a hypothetical response from the intended recipient to give you a sense what they might be thinking as they delete your email in disgust…
Link Requester
Webmaster
“Hi, Let’s swap links!” (or similar)
“I’d like to swap links with you as much as I’d like to swap STDs.”
“I’ve already linked to you and here’s the location…” or similar
“Yeah, whatever. So you bought a $99 link spam robot that created ‘link farm’ pages and your evil little tool will undoubtedly remove my link several weeks later after I’ve forgotten about you.”
“Great site!”, “Loved your site!” and other catchall statements that could apply to anybody
“It’s obvious you didn’t even bother to look at my site before emailing me.”
“You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better product.” or similar
“Yeah, that’s what they all say!”
“Please use the following text in your link…”
“Can you be any more obvious that you’re trying to manipulate the search engines? I’ll use whatever damned anchor text I choose that’s in the best interest of my users.”
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I found it to be a solid website, which, with some tuning, would make for a better ride in the search engines. And with